


Thursday's Child

by AellaIrene



Category: Vorkosigan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-17
Updated: 2010-07-17
Packaged: 2017-10-10 14:41:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/100888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AellaIrene/pseuds/AellaIrene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eudokia Vorbarra has her life changed. Forever</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thursday's Child

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://clanwilliam.livejournal.com/profile)[**clanwilliam**](http://clanwilliam.livejournal.com/) for beta reading.

Eudokia Vorbarra had never liked Vorbarr Sultana.

She had been brought up first on a remote farm in the country, and then, during the invasion, on a succession of grey military bases, and had spent only two years in Vorbarr Sultana before retiring, after her father's death, to a dacha on the South Continent, where you could see for miles, and go for weeks on end without meeting anyone not a member of your own household.

It suited her perfectly to be left there, with her books and her cats for company, except for those rare occasions when she was asked to open a Municipal Hospital, or a School for Children of the Invasion. Returning from one such visit, she handed her jacket to her personal maid for salvage- the infant chosen to present her with the bouquet had had distinctly sticky fingers- and went to her rooms to read before dinner. Years before, the year she was twelve, before the invasion, Xav had given her a box of classic romances, written by an Old Earth novelist of a period even older. She adored them and, in the twenty years of war that followed, had read them almost to shreds.

Having collected the cup of coffee sitting on the table by her door and turfed her cat off the chair in front of the window, she sat down and opened her favourite.

_The library at Fontley Priory, like most of the principal apartments in the sprawling buildings, looked to the south-east..._

The hero had just been informed of the true extent of his father's debts, and the necessity that he make a marriage of convenience, when the shooting started. For a moment, Eudokia sat still, unable to believe what she was hearing. Then the shrubbery burst into flames and she leapt to her feet, book still in hand, and ran out into the hallway. The dacha was large and sprawling, but there was only one floor of it and her rooms were close to the front, so the first thing she saw was a man in black shooting her Armsman with a plasma-arc. He turned towards her and she threw herself to the floor, as a jet of white-hot flame ripped through the air where she'd been standing and waited for death.

It didn't come. There was a thud, and a thump, and then her brother Xav was shouting "Eudokia! Eudokia, hurry!" and she lifted her head to see him standing there in front of the door, with two other men. She scrambled to her feet, hearing her thin silk stockings rip, and ran towards them.

"Xav, what's happening? What's going on?"

"Yuri's gone mad, that's what's happened. He's sent out death squads, now, come with us."

Not bothering to identify 'us', he hurried her out, into the baking late afternoon, and a scene of carnage. Bodies were spread out over the ground, some in black, some in the Imperial Livery. She stepped over one man, distantly recognising him as her butler, and up into the waiting car. All three men climbed in after her, and it rumbled into motion.

"What do you mean, Yuri's sent out death squads?"

"He has become convinced," said one of the men, hatchet-faced and dark-haired, and she was sure she ought to recognise him- "that his relatives are plotting to assassinate him. Therefore, he decided to kill them. All of them. All your siblings but the Prince and Yuri himself, are dead. So are their children. And grandchildren, except for my Aral and 'Veta's Padma."

Now she recognised him- Olivia's husband, Count Piotr Vorkosigan, who had been a guerilla leader during the Invasion, and, through the tears that welled up, she thought she recognised the other- Cousin Ezar, son of her father's long-dead youngest brother, Gregor, who had, with his elder son Serg, been killed in the First Defence of Vorbarr Sultana.

Xav was speaking. "We only got here in time because he didn't have quite enough men, and then they got lost."

Lost. I have been saved because my assassins got lost. She could hardly believe it.

"We need to act quickly, Eudokia. I cannot become Emperor- I am too old, and I have no sons. And Aral is too young. And after that..."

"And after that, come our cousins Henri, who is a drunkard, and Yegor, who is almost as bad as Yuri," said Ezar. The car turned a corner, and he slid forward, by accident, she thought at first, but then he knelt before her.

"My lady, Prince Xav and Count Vorkosigan have agreed to follow me, but I must cement my claim, and to do that, I ask for your hand in marriage."

She was Vor. She was _Vorbarra_, and Xav was looking at her in that way he had copied from their Father, that demanded obedience and honour. And, in a world so mad that nearly all her siblings - Sofia and Ivan and Yelena and Irene and Marina and Theodora- could be dead, why should she not marry the man kneeling before her, with his blazing eyes and thin mouth?

"Yes," she said, and shut her eyes.


End file.
